I use hashtables quite a bit. Often generating hashtables on the fly from other sources. But sometimes the hashtable keys that come from these external sources don’t align with what I intend to do with the hashtable. For example, one of the nifty things you can do with hashtables is splat them against a cmdlet…
Category: Scripting
PowerShell Graphing with Out-Gridview
I’ve received a lot of interest for my last few posts on graphing with the PowerShell console. But I decided I could add one more feature. Technically it might have made more sense to turn this into a separate function, but I decided to simply modify the last version of Out-ConsoleGraph. The new version adds…
PowerShell Console Graphing Revised
Many of you have been having fun with my PowerShell Console Graphing tool I posted the other day. But I felt the need to make one more major tweak. I wanted to have the option for conditional formatting. That is, display graphed entries with high values in one color, medium in another and low in…
PowerShell Screen Shots
Yesterday I posted a tool that creates a console-based graph. That command uses Write-Host which means nothing is sent to the pipeline. The only way you can really save the result is with a screen capture. Of course, you can manually use whatever screen capture program you like. If you have something like Snagit you…
Graphing with the PowerShell Console
I’ve written before about using the PowerShell console as a graphing tool, primarily using Write-Host. Most of what I’ve published before were really proof of concept. I decided to try and come up with a more formal and re-usable tool that could create a horizontal bar graph based on a numeric property from piped objects….
Friday Fun: Edit Recent File
As you might imagine I work on a lot of PowerShell projects at the same time. Sometimes I’ll start something at the beginning of the week and then need to come back to it at the end of the week. The problem is that I can’t always remembered what I called the file. So I…
Create PowerShell Scripts with a Single Command
One of the drawbacks to using a PowerShell script or function is that you have to write it. For many IT Pros, especially those new to PowerShell, it can be difficult to know where to start. I think more people would write their own tools if there was an easy way to automatically write them….
PowerShell Hyper-V Memory Report
Since moving to Windows 8, I’ve continued exploring all the possibilities around Hyper-V on the client, especially using PowerShell. Because I’m trying to run as many virtual machines on my laptop as I can, memory considerations are paramount as I only have 8GB to work with. Actually less since I still have to run Windows…
Variable Validation
In PowerShell v3 there is a new feature you might not be aware of that could save you pain and headaches. This is something you could use in scripting as well as the console. In fact, I think using it in the console is an especially smart idea. In PowerShell v2 scripts and functions we…
Friday Fun – Test PowerShell Command Name
Earlier this week I exchanged a few tweets with @jonhtyler about coming up with a proper name for a PowerShell function he was developing. The suggested best practice is to use the Verb-Noun naming convention, using an accepted verb. You can see the verbs with the Get-Verb cmdlet. So I figured why not automate this…
Hyper-V VHD Summary
When I made the move to Windows 8, one of my tasks was to migrate my test environment from VirtualBox to Hyper-V. Windows 8 includes a client Hyper-V feature that is easy to use and includes PowerShell support. Plus I needed to expand my Hyper-V skills anyway, especially from the console. After setting up a…
Counting Users by OU with PowerShell
I’ve been following a discussion thread in the PowerShell forum at ScriptingAnswers.com. The post is about counting the number of users in an OU. Well that sounds like fun. We got him started using the Quest AD cmdlets. I thought I’d share some of the code I posted. The test code he is posting is…
Event Log Morning Report
The Morning Report script I published earlier this yeas was quite popular. One of the changes I made in it was to skip getting event log entries to speed up the overall process. But I received an inquiry today about how to create the report with only event log information. The only way really is…
Get Total Number of Week Days
Recently I was asked about a way to calculate the number of week days between two dates. It is simple enough to get the total days by subtracting two dates and then using the resulting TimeSpan object. But what if you want to skip counting Saturday and Sunday? As far as I can tell there…
PowerShell Pivot Tables
I was working on a question in the Ask Don and Jeff forum about multidimensional arrays. The ultimate goal of sorts was to create an HTML report that contained in essence a pivot table. This device allows you to slice and dice data so that you can identify trends or patterns. In PowerShell, there aren’t…